by Susan Choi
“I’m not planning to sleep there,” Lee said in alarm.
She stopped working a moment to look at him. “That’s your call. But I’m not at your service all evening, I’ve got things to do. I can fetch you back down in a couple of hours if that’s what you prefer. He would probably prefer it too though he’s too polite to say so. There’s good motels you can stay in. I heard the Woodsman’s all full with a big group of hunters, but there’s the Timberline, which is perfectly fine, and Super 8’s on the far side of town, if that’s what you’re used to.”
“I can’t leave my car here,” he protested, astonished. In the onslaught of the moment, it had taken the whole of her speech for him to locate his central objection: he couldn’t be at their mercy. He’d been one with his car for five days. Now he’d finally crossed over enemy lines; he couldn’t possibly cast off that armor and go forward naked.
“Nope: he was very specific about that,” Marjorie said, brushing past him to stretch a tarp over the items she’d thrown in the bed. “You must know he’s really particular. I’m not trying to be rude, I’m just telling you. I’m sure it’s for your own safety anyway.”
“My safety?” Lee cried.
“The last leg of the road to his place isn’t really a road. That little car there”—she cast a scornful glance toward it—“won’t do it. What, you think that he wants to kidnap you? More like no one wants to be hauling you out. It’s already starting to rain, and the temperature’s dropping. It’s going to be snow. Lots of it, if you trust the forecasters.”
After this she made clear she was giving him a chance to come around and stop giving her trouble. City person, she seemed to be seething as she yanked on her twine and tarp corners, or perhaps, Foreign person. Lee tried to overmaster himself. He groped for the script of the visiting friend. “Does Dr. Burt live alone?” he wondered, in the most offhand tone he could muster. But his question had the opposite effect from what he had intended. When Marjorie turned to him, her face seemed for the first time suspicious.
“How did you say that you know Dr. Burt?”
“We were graduate students together.”
“From the university,” Marjorie translated. When Lee nodded, she seemed to consider a moment. “Haven’t seen him in a long time,” she surmised.
“No.”
“Well,” she said, and now an entirely new aspect entered her face. Her narrow eyes glowed. “I’m sure you’ll find that he’s still the same genius as back when you knew him.”
She might have bared her shriveled breasts; Lee opened his mouth but then failed to pronounce any words.
“I’m ready,” she added, with a peremptory gesture toward the truck’s passenger seat.
At his own car, Lee stood a moment staring at his suitcase and briefcase and seeming to feel and see all at once the few paltry items that comprised his existence—and then, like a man stepping out a window, he locked the car’s door and left them behind.
He was trembling as the truck rumbled onto the road. In the course of their negotiations, purple twilight had come, bringing with it a fine mist that shrouded forms and condensed into zigzagging rivulets on the windshield. It wasn’t the way he’d imagined reunion with Gaither. He had never imagined the exacting gatekeeper, whom he supposed wasn’t so unlike Ruth. He had never imagined the coarse, remote town. Yet what form had expectancy taken? He could only say it had featured its own thorough absence. The dream sensation took the form of an ambush, a thunderbolt falling. It in no way included a rumpled old man, unshowered, unslept, uncourageous, conveyed like a poor supplicant to the feet of the pope.
“Turn off,” Lee said. “Please turn off. Turn around.”
“What?” she said, over the staticky hiss of the tires.
Shame was struggling with panic; he could hardly push words from his mouth. “Please turn around, ma’am. I’m not feeling well. Turn around.”
“That’s the Woodsman,” she indicated, calling out as if acres of space separated the seats. She had taken his inaudible plea for a visitor’s question.
They left the zone of bleeding fluorescents, the Exxon, the Super 8, so that the black night, now complete, settled sharply around them. The mist hardened into rain, and the few taillights and headlights they saw seemed to glow more intensely. Then there were no other cars on the road, as if they all had been swallowed. The road began to climb and wind. There was nothing to see, but Lee had his vertiginous innards to show him the terrain. Marjorie put on her turn signal, and after a long interval she began to slow down, and then kept going more and more slowly, until they were almost merely idling without moving at all. Just as the waiting grew unbearable, she gave a pull to the wheel.
They bumped off the asphalt.
“I can’t,” Lee admitted with shame.
“You see,” she mistook him, agreeing with satisfaction. “It’s so little a road even I almost miss it each time.”
Now branches were scraping the truck on both sides. The grade had grown steeper than seemed possible, and yet the truck still ascended, masticating what sounded like large rocks and even tree limbs. With each shudder Lee thought they would peel backward off the hillside. They clawed upward at barely the rate of a walk, scraped around a hairpin, clawed again. At one point the truck actually stopped, and Marjorie shouldered open her door and was devoured by darkness—the sighing treble of the rain briefly joined to the noisy bass drumming of drops on the roof—only to startlingly reappear in the fan of the headlamps, amid translucent strings of water, her hood tightly cinched on her face. Marjorie ducked out of sight; there were sounds of a struggle. Then she’d swung herself briskly back in, slammed the door, and their glacial ascent had resumed.
“You get a branch caught in the axle, that’s it,” she remarked.
Lee said nothing; he stared through the twitch of the wiper blades into the dark. Any thought of escape had left him; he only wanted it done. He felt dread, in the form of an almost unbearable pressure exerted on him by the forthcoming moment. His ribs buckled under its weight. The abyss of the very near future; he could say to himself that tonight he would find someplace decent for a glass of red wine and a plank of pink steak and a local potato coal-hot in its jacket of foil, but it was an idle extravagant dream, severed from actual life by the next several minutes. No continuities made the transition. Nothing from now, damp and cold and dreadful, and nothing from the past.
By contrast to his silence, Marjorie seemed more and more pleased and gregarious the more like a vision of hell grew their route. “You bring that foreign car of yours up this way,” she was envisioning, shouting at him to be heard, “there’d be no one to help you get out. With this weather that’s coming, they might not’ve found you for weeks. Nobody lives up here. No one. That’s how Dr. Burt likes it. Oh, there’s a hunting shack not far from him,” she acknowledged, imagining Lee’s shudder of horror as an attempt at refutation and lifting one shoulder to point the same way that he twitchingly had, by coincidence, “but nobody’s ever in there. The owners are city people like you, I think they live down in Boise. Get a place in the mountains, they think it’s all fun. Then they find it’s hard work and they never come up. That suits Dr. Burt fine. To be frank I was very surprised when he said that he had a friend going to visit. I didn’t know that he knew anyone. He keeps to himself, besides me. Even I’ve never been in the house.”
“Never?” Lee said, his presentiment of horror so great his voice finally wrenched free, seemingly on its own. Too late he realized this was a wound to her pride.
“He never lets anybody come near,” she shot back. “Only me. And with me it was years of him hoofing it all the way down into town to get books before he ever accepted a ride. He hasn’t even got a car, you know. He’s always managed everything on his own.”
“When I knew…Dr. Burt, he was married,” Lee risked, not to further antagonize her but in the hope she could somehow explain Gaither’s transformation. Instead she reverted to taciturn scorn.
“Dr. Burt’s never been married,” she said, in a tone that made clear she would not endure any more nonsense.
“It was a long time ago.”
This drew no response at all. Lee felt the land slowly righting itself, scaling down to a less deadly angle. The truck in response gained comparative speed. Now perhaps they were walking, not crawling. Lee had no idea how much farther there was, but the minuscule acceleration made him feel that his time had grown short.
“How do you know him?” He suddenly felt he must know this himself.
“I told you. He needs books. For his work.”
“His work?”
“His mathematical work.” The way she uttered “mathematical,” with excessive precision, managed to be both reverent and ironical, as if to imply that in Gaither the pursuit was sacred, while in Lee it was silly, if not contemptible.
“Yes, of course, but these are…very specialized texts. You have what he needs, in your library?”
“I write other libraries on his behalf and I order things for him.” All at once the truck turned and achieved a plateau of some kind, and Marjorie struck the horn quickly three times, as if repeating a code, almost scaring Lee out of his skin. “We’re here,” she said, cutting the engine.
The truck’s headlights dimly suggested a tiny structure, lodged in the trees; more discernible by far was a woodpile, almost as tall as the structure and wider, beneath a blue tarp. Then the truck was answered with a flame, a surprising small light that unswallowed itself to reveal, from within, a window, and someone moving behind it.
“Thank you,” Lee said, throwing open his door with resolve. The rain angled in, stinging him. He was zippering his own, nonwater-proof, windbreaker and settling his cap on his head. Now it was all mundane actions. Securing himself against rain. Getting out of the car. He was going. He slid out and stood pinned between truck and tree trunks, being pelted by rain.
“Hang on,” Marjorie said, making to leave the truck also.
“Don’t come with me!” Lee barked, with such force that she actually stopped and swung around to look through the truck’s cab at him. “I’d like privacy, to be reunited with this very old friend. Please,” he added, aware he sounded unhinged.
“But you can’t just go up to his door,” she said, actually cowed. “If I were you, I would wait till he fetches you in.”
A pale rectangle appeared. “Marjorie?” called a rough and yet resonant voice.
“And I’ve got books for him,” she added, but these had been riding against Lee’s left thigh all the way up the mountain, and he seized them before she could, several backbreaking, sharp-cornered tomes in a limp plastic sack. “Please leave us alone!” he said, slamming the door. He turned toward the cabin, willing her disappearance, clumsily shielding the books with his body, stumbling through oozing terrain toward the cabin’s front door.
“I’ve brought that friend of yours,” Marjorie called. Whether because she was decent after all, or just impatient and sufficiently soaked, after a moment’s hesitation she got back into the truck and restarted the engine. Lee heard her negotiating the awkward reversal, commencing the mud crunch back down. Two moss-slickened steps raised him out of the mud to the threshold.
“My God, you’ve come!” The man beckoned, marveled. “Please, please! You can see I don’t often have guests in my humble abode. ‘My pallet is the bracken and my lamp the distant star.’ What opium-addled old poet penned that bosky line? Forgive me if I feel I’ve wrought a small miracle. The hermit has his garrulous streak as the jester his tears. And you can see, now you’ve seen at first hand, what I’m limited to. We can start there: my humble factotum. Marjorie. She is blameless, Lee. If you have quarrels with me, they cannot touch on her. She doesn’t know she abets a lone huntsman. Please, give me the books! And you’re drenched by our welcoming weather. Here is the woodstove, Lee, here is the peg for your jacket, here’s ancient raiment of mine you can wear while that dries. My diet of berries and roots seems to suit me so well I can’t button it up anymore, which has spared it hard use and preserved it for you. Forgive me, Lee. I possess an advantage. I have seen your graven image. I’ve digested the work of the decades. I’m not shocked by you, just delighted, but you’re shocked by me.”
A blast of wood smoke and intimate odor scorched Lee’s eyes and nostrils; yet despite the strength of these foul exhalations, the houndstooth jacket drooped, a windless flag, from Lee’s hand.
It was true he had grown bulkier, but by way of stored power. The thick chest and arms of someone who maintained his own woodpile, yet the hunched shoulders of someone who read by poor light. Or who ticked his own sinister clocks.
“A queer paradox of the hermit’s existence: we live in a state of expectancy. Keep the hordes at the foot of the mountain, but what if an elegant Martian descends from the sky? Or a friend from the past. I have tea, nothing Japanese, sadly, just bitter Lipton’s and a fruit distillate called Red Zinger. I had just, before Marjorie bore you to me, poured a glass of my apricot wine, and it stands there untouched as if hoping to lure Elijah.”
The face almost completely concealed by leonine hair and tremendous gray beard, but the eyes—although Russianized somehow by proximate hair—still the avid, self-satisfied eyes Lee recalled, though he wouldn’t have thought that he could. The eyes hurtled to him from a vault, on the wings of the jacket.
“Lewis isn’t here,” Lee said—telling himself, reprimanding himself, wringing the jacket with fury.
“Lewis? My God: Lewis Gaither. I’m astonished Mnemosyne yields the name. You weren’t expecting a full class reunion, I hope?” Whitehead laughed with delight. “Lewis Gaither. I wonder where he ended up. As I remember, a Christ-hyping dimwit. They can be the most dangerous people, but he seems not to have managed to do any harm.”
“You killed Hendley,” Lee blurted.
“The ‘Minister of Information’? Yes. Not one of my prouder experiments. I don’t like them to linger and suffer: that is barbaric. But it brought us together.”
Perhaps this was what Lee required, the repugnant suggestion of fellowship, or perhaps it was just that they heard something, a vague engine noise briefly mixed with the sound of the rain.
“That can’t be Marjorie again,” Whitehead mused. “Don’t tell me you’re the posse comitatus after all.”
Lee had only stepped over the threshold into the cavelike and flickering room, cramped and dark as a mouth, which he now stroboscopically grasped was enclosed on all sides by bookshelves, exotically floored by a miscellany of overlapping mats and pelts, enlivened by examples of handmade furnishings that conformed cleverly to the space—a hinged worktable, a hinged single bed—and centered snugly on the woodstove, the room’s ardent heart, in the pulsating light of which towered a miniature city of boxes and cans, cartons, cylinders, spools of wire, plastic bottles and jugs, lengths of pipe, squares of screen, jars of matches, narrow towers of small blocks of wood almost touching, with their pinnacle points, the stalactite-like pendants that hung here and there from the ceiling, the hacksaws and hand drills, an upside-down forest of tools; he absorbed these impressions instantaneously, his mind’s shutter held open, as he turned for the door, half an arm’s reach away, and plunged through it, skidding down the two moss-slickened steps, belatedly rejecting the houndstooth jacket and then tripping over and trampling it into the mud. A weak, limited glow seemed to mark the far side of the clearing. Lee felt one knee fail beneath him but was still thrashing forward, the sluiceway of rain blinding him, he had smacked into something—
Arms seized and bundled him into a car, some kind of tall sport-utility vehicle. He saw the eerie green glow of a dashboard display, varying concentrations of darkness, heard doors slam and felt the seesaw movements of a three-point reversal—
“Had to wait till the pickup left,” a voice near him was saying. “He went in and came out. Yeah, I have no idea. You’re breaking up, wait a sec.”
From far away Whitehead was calling, “Who is th
at? Who’s there?”
Then they were crashing down the narrow declivity, the tree branches snapping like fireworks. Surprisingly soon, they were back to the tranquil rain hiss of the two-lane paved road.
“Are you injured?” a new voice was asking. “What happened in there? Are you injured? Can you tell us what happened in there? What were you doing in there anyway? What’s your name?”
“…No idea, no, I don’t…. Yeah, I don’t. Heard, not saw. Tell them sit tight, I guess.”
“Can you talk? What’s your name?”
“…like a bat out of hell. Doesn’t seem to be injured.”
“What’s your name, sir?” The dome light snapped on, an explosion of brightness. Lee gasped and sheltered his eyes. From beneath trembling palms, he saw three men, one driving, one craned around from the front seat, one in the back beside him, all of them wearing brownish green, hunterlike clothing, caps with flaps, lace-up boots, bulky vests. The man beside Lee was holding a rifle, its end pointed out the back window.
“Speak English?” demanded the man in the front passenger seat.
Lee was still heaving for breath. His heart smashed his rib cage. He was soaked to the skin, he had a pain in his knee, he was shaking so much it seemed possible he was in shock. “Lee,” he ejected with effort.
Instant darkness again as the dome light blinked out.
“Says his name’s Lee,” the voice said. A beat later the voice said in surprise, “Oh, no shit?”
There was definitely something wrong with the seats of the car: they had lost all their springs, or their backs rose at too sharp an angle. Whatever it was, it enforced an uncomfortable senile posture, pressed the ribs to the guts, wrung the abdomen, crumpled the spine; he was forced to curl up like a fetus yet ached from decay.
He was sobbing. He pressed his hot face against his cold hands.
“…possibly injured,” the distant voice reevaluated.
Whoever was driving was speeding, or at least the night seemed to rush awesomely past. The rain had grown viscous; it battered the roof of the car like many thousands of handfuls of mud being constantly hurled. The car swung through a turn, moved more slowly, then came to a stop. His elbows pressed onto his thighs, his face onto his palms. These conjunctions seemed eternal and unalterable. Doors unlatched, the dome light blazed on, doors slammed, the dome light was extinguished, doors were forcibly unhinged again, the dome light reignited—he perceived it with no more interest than he might have sensed changes in weather from the depths of a vault. A familiar voice said, “Tell them to meet us in the room. And I want some hot tea. Not that shit that the restaurant serves. Get the stuff that I brought, it’s on that chest-of-drawers thing on the left when you come in the door. Yeah, you’ll get the water from the restaurant. Make sure it’s boiling. And a chicken soup and the burger and fries. Medium. No, say medium rare. They overcook everything.”
